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Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Silent Retrieval

Silent Retrieval

Tom Sheehan

The day had a head start on young Liam Craddock, he could
feel it, and all that it promised. Across the years, on the slimmest sheet of
air, piggybacking a whole man’s aura on that fleet thinness, he caught the
sense of tobacco chaw or toby, mule leather’s hot field abrasion, gunpowder’s
trenchant residue, men at confusion. If it wasn’t a battlefield in essence, or scarred
battle ranks, he did not know what else it could be. And it carried the burning
embers of memory.

The yellowed pages of a hand-written Civil War journal had
fallen open at Liam’s feet, almost 146 years since the first shot was fired in
that war. The calligraphy grabbed at him first, faded in areas and yet sweeping
with an old-line flourish making him wonder about the tone and meter of the
language, sensing an initial presence of old-fashioned pompousness or posed
dignity. Practically nudging it aside at its birth, he quickly discarded this
hastily formed opinion. With deep interest pushing at him, coming from an
unnamed and limitless source, he had been scrounging in the attic of the old
farm house in Bow, New Hampshire, a long way from battle sites near Richmond in
Virginia, Baker’s Creek in Mississippi or Shiloh or Spring Hill in Tennessee. For
more than 125 of those years an arm of the Craddock family had lived here at
Bow, in a colonial farmhouse with seven rooms, two huge chimneys, a hogback out
back and wide fields out front and riding up near hills like a lease extension.
Now, just turned 20, a good looking student, wiry and athletic, dark Irish complexion
possibly inherited from an early Spanish sailor overboard off Ireland’s coast, Liam
loved to read about the Civil War, anything he could get his hands on. It had
settled into him, geared his interests like a smart gift, when he was young
boy. And here, an unexpected present, was a first hand account, from his great
great great-grandfather, Ronan Craddock, Sergeant, Company C, 43rd.
Georgia Infantry Regiment, Army of Tennessee.

The war was real, for both of them, the writer and the
reader, the crucible of unbelievable deaths, mounds of dead men, fields strewn
with dead men, row on row of dead men, the smell of death floating uphill like
a pot of evil at a boil. He cringed and came abreast of his courage again. And there,
deep in his genes, complementary, he felt the tug of the sea where the rough
tide had brought ashore the Spanish sailor his grandfather talked so often
about, as if he himself had met that Armada seaman.

“We have all been warriors,” the old man said on many
occasions, his pipe lit on the porch letting off an Edgeworth cut, a soft
breeze whispering in the cornfields, “since that swimmer caught up a lass. And
your turn will come, Liam, in one manner or another. You may never know the
shape of its coming, but come it will, and bring you to conflict. If you never
wear a uniform, you’ll still be in the ranks.”

It was promise more than omen, more legacy than habit, and
had long settled in place. All this time the journal had been so close to him and
yet so far. He wondered where his attention had been, if anybody left had known
of the journal’s existence. Then, in one flame of awareness, he was sure his
grandfather knew of this “find,” had seen it coming to him.

Awareness crammed him, knowing he nursed a brooding hunger
about “things unusual.” This was like other sensations coming home in his mind,
taking deep root. Liam could feel the message coming toward him, almost
ascribed, not as swift as a shot, but unerring in its aim. The stilted
handwriting, dense in some places as if battlefield artifacts were in tow, or
faded in others portions the way a sleepy hand might write, scrawled often with
afterthoughts along the narrow margins, came alive and gave this readable
account:

“Lord, I believe it is
30th April, 1864. Wravel Grane died in these arms this day, from a
minie ball lodged in his neck and tearing apart a huge vein profuse in
bleeding. A gentle man he was, and dear friend and comrade, who never once let
an alcoholic drink pass his lips. The man knew no curses, and if they had ever
sounded in his head, he never once in my company managed them to use. His last
words to me, of any personal approach, came on this bright dawn where we looked
out on the Virginia
countryside stretching before us a greaten and resplendent new birth of the
land. As they did in Pickens County, back home in Georgia, forward slopes of
hills proved quicker at greenery than backsides, but spreading fast, and maple’s
aroma swam full to the air. The sun struck all a goodly light the whole while.

Wravel and I were west
of Richmond but few miles, in sight of the James River, and had but a canister
of bread found in the trappings of a dead Union soldier, nearly at our feet
toward sleep. His left eye and cheek were missing and made him grotesque so
near to that dread sleep. Lt. Griggs said to kick him aside, kick that human
instrument You used to grant us Your bread. Wravel had said earlier that You
would provide for us. You did provide a burial place for him locally, after we
received your bread. Lord, I thank You for that. As we scanned the far hills at
dawn, smoke rising from a hundred positions, life moving ever on, Wravel came
aware that certainties and grimalkins or Old Harry himself were piling atop
him. “Do not get separated from me ever, Ronan,” he had implored, in the awful
goodness that was owed in him. Know all that Wravel’s words haunt me yet, about
that separation and know they ever will.”

The last entry, in the inch-thick journal with dust as an
extra cover, read: I say Amen, Lord. I
was wounded at Jonesboro, Georgia, 31st August 1864 and was at
home on furlough, unfit for further service, at the close of the war, my fated
comrade Wravel Grane so soon gone aground. Will You will a reunion?

In between those two entries, Ronan Craddock, of Company C,
43rd. Georgia Infantry Regiment, Army of Tennessee, had been
captured at Baker’s Creek, Mississippi on 16th May 1863, exchanged at Port
Delaware, Delaware, and re-entered the military. The above entry followed there
in place and pulled Liam deeper into the mix, cocking his interest to a higher
pitch, and penetrating him as deep as a bayonet wound.

He felt at odds with the world, as though its elements were
plaguing him only. The autumn chill settled atop him, though smooth as a
plastic cover. An October wind talked at the lone window, yet the dust on the
hinged travel trunk appeared undisturbed for a long time. Whorls of dust were
petals on the trunk lid, and the brass lock obviously had not been opened in
years. For the next three hours, autumn’s touch running its full gamut on him, day
slowly falling beside him in another pile dim under bulb, Liam Craddock read
every word written by Sgt. Ronan Craddock, of the Army of Tennessee. As far as
Liam knew, Ronan was the first in a line of family soldiers this side of Ireland andthat other war.

*

Excerpts of the journal were absolute horror shows on every
page: about the death around the sergeant, who could count bodies and limbs at
day’s end separated by the hundreds and hundreds; who had seen headless men fall
directly beside him on the skirmish line, their heads elsewhere unknown; who
had seen dead men near dusk sitting horseback or astride a mule grazing among
the bodies; who had seen his best friend come to a bloody pulp in a matter of
seconds.

Liam’s body would jerk uncontrollably at each of these
descriptions of mortality, as though taste and smell and sound, and the awful
forbidden touch, had found him company in the attic in a last stab of unearthly
silence.

He was somehow surviving a horrible day.

At length, darkness full on him, his mind completely blown
away by journal revelations, seeing Ronan Craddock practically come alive in a
hundred scenes, Liam put the journal back into the trunk and closed the cover.
A thumping kept time at his breast, bringing a hollow echo to the back of his
head, the kind an empty canyon emits, a still room, a dark hallway. Ideas and
approaches of every sort leaped upon him and he had to get away to sort all the
efforts of his mind as they tried to tell him what to do, what path to take.

“Whoa, man, you are something else,” he said at one point,
dipping his head in solemn salute to that old patriarch of battle, whose war
scenes, as full of life as though he had been there to experience them, kept
crossing his mind swift as movie reruns. They banged out a code of conduct for
night listening. Lines of march and deployment came to him, shadowy, at edges
of the attic room. Campfires lit up darker corners, though shadows ran loose
again. The rustle of a night at war triggered other visions right on the edge
of certainty. The footsteps of a camp guard sounded faintly but surely in the
midst of an otherwise eerie silence. Then, loose in the dusk of evening, a
horse’s hoofs tattled far whereabouts, a messenger in flight or a runaway. Gunfire
residue rose as sharp as skunk odor on the air, cosmoline odor just as
persistent. The senses amuck.

All the parts of war came as real as a brick in the hand, a
wash of wind, the smell of flesh at discord.

Liam’s father, Desmond, lone son of Padraig, in the line of
lone sons back through Lucas, Brendan and Ronan, had died the year Liam was
born. Desmond was 53 and had tried for years to have at least the one son that for
a half dozen generations had filtered down through the family of lone boys. He
never saw his son Liam. He died in a car crash seven months before Liam was
born. The young boy hungered all his young years for some family history to
grab onto, a grasp on male ancestors all locked to their own wars.

When Liam finally came down from the attic, his grandmother
said, “See anything you like? You have your pick. Anything at all.”

Liam nodded. “There’s an old war journal in a trunk in a
corner up there. I’d like that.”

“Get it now before anybody else lays a claim on it. It’s
yours.” In his eyes she saw that he already had claimed ownership, knew he best
fit it.

Liam ran up the stairs to get the journal. In the middle of
the attic room he could feel someone there with him, a presence making a
statement. He tried to hear the words coming out of the stillness, from the far
corners and under the twin gables. He realized he was repeating some of what he
had read; the words, as if spoken to him, hanging out like echoes.

And here he was now, less than a week
after reading the journal, still adapting his life to a new influence; he was
staring at an artist’s paintings for long hours at an exhibition of the
artist’s Civil War work. The artist, Jeff Fioravanti, had noticed Liam the very
first day almost in a trance, eyes squinting, body taut, locked by an internal
force on an external object.

From the outset, when first plagued by a vanity’s reaction,
Jeff sensed some other impact working on the younger man whose attention he saw
was rigid, who could stare at a painting for a full half hour without moving. Jeff
thought that a painter’s sensitivity could best understand that reaction. It
had happened to him on occasion, but he hungered for any background
information, the way he searched for reasons to start a painting.In the middle of the third day of the
exhibit, hundreds of people having passed through the 55 paintings only of
Civil War battle sites but not battle scenes, a number of people having
returned for a second viewing, he approached the mesmerized viewer.

Jeff did not know about the earlier discovery by the young
man of the journal written by Ronan
Craddock, born 1844, died in bed in 1925 just before his 81st
birthday. For almost half a century the journal, supposedly unread by anybody
in the family, had been bedded in a trunk in the corner of the old family
farmhouse in New Hampshire,
until such time as the family farm was going to be sold off for a huge
development.

Liam, still haunted by the journal, was in turn entranced by
the paintings. Jeff guessed accurately his age to be no more than 19 or 20
years, saw he had no discerning marks about him, no scars, no prominent
feature, no describable sense of being other than young, healthy, interested in
either the art of painting or the Civil War itself. Jeff was not sure of the
latter options, but he was aware of some deep connection working on the young
man. He thought it to be as strong as the many Civil War battle sites and their
impact had been on him, Ground Zero acknowledgment, as Jeff called it. And he
also noted that the young man kept coming back to one painting, so he thought
he’d best check it out.

“Excuse me,” Jeff said, “but I’ve noticed your interest in
the exhibit for three days now, and your particular interest in this painting.
My name is Jeff Fioravanti and I know something about it. I painted it.” He put
out his hand.

“My name is Liam Craddock. I’m sure my great great great-grandfather
fought there and his best friend was buried nearby.” And Jeff listened as Liam
told him the story of the journal and the impact it made on him. “It’s so real
to me, but especially in one place where he wrote a few words that keep ringing
in the back of my head: ‘Do not get
separated from me ever, Ronan.’ I don’t know what they mean, but they won’t
let go of me.”

Creases on the young man’s forehead inclined his thinking.
He said, “Is there near that battleground a cemetery where the dead were laid
to rest, Confederate dead? One that’s still there, being tended?” He looked
back upon the painting. “Where is this place?”

“I’ve been there,” Jeff said, finding some of his own
memories leaping to the fore. “It’s the Hollywood Cemetery.
There are thousands of soldiers buried there, and it’s well cared for,
exceptionally well. It’s a large tract of land that holds some famous people. I
spent a couple of days walking the grounds, noting some of the more famous names,
but there are privates and generals there. He did not immediately tell Liam
that he had been hit by another impact at Ronan Craddock’s words, which brought
back something that he heard recently; some survivors of the battleship U. S.
S. Arizona, downed at Pearl Harbor in 1941, insisted they be buried with their
comrades when their turn came. He felt the connection would come with awed
association.

“I’m going down there,” Liam said, the oath traveling with
his voice. “I want to see if more of the journal hits me, if there is some
action to be commissioned, if it’s for me.”

In a pause loaded with information Jeff could not fathom,
yet was aware of, Liam Craddock continued; “I know I am being called upon. It’s
always been there. My grandfather said it best; ‘Your turn will come, Liam, in
one manner or another. You may never know the shape of its coming, but come it
will, and bring you to conflict. If you never wear a uniform, you’ll still be
in the ranks.’ I’ve heard that echo for years on end.”

Three months later, painting a new scene of a battle site at
Pickett’s Mill Battlefield at Dallas, Georgia, Jeff Fioravanti saw a local
newspaper headline leap at him; Yankee
descendant desecrates CSA cemetery. It was the story of Liam Craddock, a
student from Keene, New
Hampshire, who had been discovered, late at night, digging up a
grave at Hollywood Cemetery in Virginia.
Police had been alerted by a man walking his dog late at night through the
cemetery, as he was accustomed to do four or five nights a week.

Charlie Boatwright (“spell
it wright, sir”), an Army veteran of the Korean War, was walking his Golden
Lab, Lee Bong Ha, on one of the perimeter roads of the cemetery, when he heard
what he believed to be a shovel hitting a rock. “It had that affirming sound,”
he said. “You’d know it from gardening, grubstaking, or digging a well. I was
infuriated and thought I’d better rush the culprit, but my knees don’t do me as
well as they used to, so I slipped off to a neighbor’s house and called the
police.”

“Then I went back to see what was going on, trying to get
there before the police, get in a viewable position. I saw the young man, the
one the police eventually arrested, working on a hole about two feet deep,
handling a long-handled shovel like it was an old friend, like he knew what he
was doing. Because they could not find the letter he claimed he was “finally
delivering to a comrade in arms” the authorities charged Liam Craddock with
desecrating a national cemetery and eventually fined him one hundred dollars.”

Most people of the area thought it a proper and fitting fine
and wanted to let it go at that.

The ruse about the letter to be delivered satisfied them. It
was only later the whole truth was revealed.

Charlie Boatwright, on a visit from Jeff Fioravanti, subsequently
volunteered the following information: “Before the police got there, only a few
minutes as I recall, the

young man in question retrieved a sort of golden pot in a
somewhat ornate shape from a large bag, and with a quiet ceremony of his own, a
kind of minor ritual I suspect, slipped it with care down into the hole. He
placed several shovels of earth in on top of the pot. That’s what he was doing
when the police showed up, lights flashing all over him and the cemetery,
throwing those weird shadows I’m sometimes anxious about. You never know about
cemeteries, where I try to be friendly all the time because you never know who
else might be visiting at the same time. The police asked what he was doing and
he said he was trying to leave a letter down there for the buried person to
read, but it had blown away. Most people laughed at him but to me there was
quiet sincerity about the young man that perked my interest. I did not think he
was a vandal. That was obvious to me, even though he was in pretty bad pickle,
if I may say so. That’s why I did not tell the police when they showed up that
he had already put something down in the hole. They did not look for it, nor
did they ask me. I was reserving judgment on the situation. It was not until
later, when the police brought me down to the station, that I knew I was right,
that I had done the right thing. It was then I heard the cemetery workers had
filled the hole in and replaced the grass sod, which, I must tell you, was most
carefully lifted out of place in the beginning. It was evident to me that there
was a plan at hand, and I was in on it. Months later, young Liam wrote to me,
thanking me for not giving him away, and telling me the whole story.

This is what Liam wrote to Charlie Boatwright, once a
sergeant in Baker Company, 1st Battalion, 31st Infantry
Regiment, 7th Infantry Division, Korea 1951-52, one of the Polar Bears:

Sir,

I want to thank you
for what you did for me at Hollywood
Cemetery that night,
and how you held back some information from the police. It is appreciated very
much, by me and by Sgt. Ronan Craddock, of Company C, 43rd. Georgia
Infantry Regiment, Army of Tennessee.
A few words in his Civil War journal really penetrated me. He wrote what his
best friend and comrade Wravel Grane said to him on the morning he was to die,
as if he knew it was coming: Do not get separated from me ever, Ronan.

That simple statement
hung over me for a long while, but I knew what he meant, just as it came to me when I learned about sailors who
survived the sinking of the USS Arizona on December 7, 1941; asking that when
they finally die they be brought back aboard theirship at Pearl Harbor. Such things haunt my
soul, shake it loose, and always have. In that extent I am most fortunate
regardless of being in a compromising situation, seeming without reason or good
excuse. Somehow I knew what that draw was, that literal magnetism, between the
sergeant and his comrade. So, after much thinking and a vow that took hold of
me in an instant, I got a job in a mortuary, learned a few tricks of the trade,
dug up my ancestor’s body and cremated him. I swear he was lost up here in Bow on
the side of an overgrown hill that now holds only his sweat of years. Others in
the family must have known, but it became my commission. Ronan Craddock’s ashes
went into the grave beside comrade Wravel Grane before the police got there,
and were well-covered at their arrival. Those two soldiers are now together, as
bidden, their arms at rest, peace within and without them, comrades into the
face of eternity.

I trust this will put
to rest any lingering doubts about your participation.

The day "Claire" from Lost mentioned me!

Pat Says:

Pat Conroy just told me that I take a foul art and give it a queenly air, then he kissed my hand.

Decatur Book Festival, 2014

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